I don't do selfishness. Partially this is because I don't believe in personal identity, partially because I feel like there's no fundamental difference between me and anyone else, and partially because it doesn't make sense to me intuitively. As such, I try to help myself as much as is necessary to help people in general. Anything more is akrasia.
You generally should donate all of your money to one cause. If you're "donating to yourself", there's significantly diminishing returns, so you'd figure out how much you value the two comparatively, and figure out at what point the marginal cost of your happiness is equal to the value of the best charity.
Incidentally, this works out as having a certain amount of money you keep, and then everything beyond that you donate, regardless of how much you actually make. As such, if you're Bill Gates, you'd donate virtually all your money to charity.
Was this downvoted because people disagree with the ideas about the mind/personal identity or for some other reason?
I also think that I have no egoistic terms in my utility function and that utility functions which such term are likely incoherent due to being based on false ideas (as instantiated in humans, not in general; obviously it is possible to have a utility function that could be described as egoistic). I am unsure of whether my utility function has terms that are egoistic conditional on my philosophy of mind being wrong, which I assign maybe a 20% probability.
Related to: People who want to save the world
I have recently been diagnosed with cancer, for which I am currently being treated with good prognosis. I've been reevaluating my life plans and priorities in response. To be clear, I estimate that the cancer is responsible for much less than half the total danger to my life. The universals - X-risks, diseases I don't have yet, traffic accidents, etc. - are worse.
I would like to affirm my desire to Save Myself (and Save The World For Myself). Saving the world is a prerequisite simply because the world is in danger. I believe my values are well aligned with those of the LW community; wanting to Save The World is a good applause light but I believe most people want to do so for selfish reasons.
I would also like to ask LW members: why do you prefer to contribute (in part) towards humankind-wide X-risk problems rather than more narrow but personally important issues? How do you determine the time- and risk- tradeoffs between things like saving money for healthcare, and investing money in preventing an unfriendly AI FOOM?
It is common advice here to focus on earning money and donating it to research, rather than donating in kind. How do you decide what portion of income to donate to SIAI, which to SENS, and which to keep as money for purely personal problems that others won't invest in? There's no conceptual difficulty here, but I have no idea how to quantify the risks involved.